A_Terrible_Matriarchy

Easterine on A Terrible Matriarchy: I  wrote this book in the middle of 2005 experimentally but stopped at page four, thinking it was too dark. I sent the four pages to my publisher in India, who encouraged me to write the rest so that is how it grew. As it is a book about the Angami society that I grew up in and had intimate knowledge of, it was good to be writing it in Norway, geographically distanced from it. I could then see that the patriarchal structure of my society was underlined by a very strong matriarchy. Of course, this differs from village to village but women do hold an invisible sway over the social dictates, especially older women in the family.  Yet, it must be added, that it is stronger in some families and some villages and almost non- existent in others. Ambivalent, sort of.  I saw it as a negative female energy manifestation when the little girl who is the central character of the book is suppressed by her grandmother when she goes to live with her. Her grandmother calls it cultural education. But for the girl it is denial of things that were permitted to her brothers. It is not a life.  The struggle of the girl to get educated, the sacrifices she makes and the position she creates for herself in later life is also true of what is happening to women in my society today.  I  think that she discovers a positive female energy inside of her and uses it to shape her social reality for the better. The problems of alcoholism amongst men and dropouts at school and frustration are all related to the unsolved political conflict at home.  The overwhelming presence of a spiritual reality is also true to the Naga experience. There are flashbacks into the Naga past, a colonial history under British administration, the second world war and the Japanese invasion of our lands and the struggle for freedom and all its complications after Indian independence. These form the background of the story which is the young girl, Dielieno's story, and through it, the telling of a people's life now disappearing very surely.  My own grandmother was from Meghalaya, from a matrilineal society. It was interesting for me to see her people and society and the position of the girl-child in the matrilineal society as opposed to the patriarchal society of Naga society she had married into.  Reviews: "Every society and age seems to have a girl's coming of age story that captures the society and the time so well that it becomes part of the people's living memory for good. Antigone for ancient Greece, Jane Eyre for Victorian England, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl for early nineteenth century American south, The Diary of Anne Frank for Nazi Europe, Abeng for postcolonial Caribbean, Nervous Conditions for 1960s Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), The House on Mango Street for Hispanic America, to mention a few. For mid-twentieth century Naga society, Easterine Iralu's A Terrible Matriarchy could very well be that story. It also has the distinction of being the first Naga novel in English." — Paul Pimomo  "It's possible to describe Easterine Iralu's insightful novel, A Terrible Matriarchy (2007, Zubaan, New Delhi, 314 pages), as simply a story about a nasty grandmother named Vibano and a disenchanted child. Actually, the book offers much more -- a generation-long saga of a troubled family in a troubled place. The unusual setting is Nagaland, now a state in northeastern India, at an unspecified time in the second half of the 20th century.      Even ordinary domestic activities suggest past turmoil. 'Mother baked a cake in the ammunition box that had been left behind during the war by British troops. Almost every house had one of these.'      Although many characters struggle with near-poverty, they own plenty of high-growth seeds of conflict. Problems stem from extreme alcoholism, domestic violence, simmering resentments, neighborhood gossip, fearful superstitions and constant tension between modern thinkers and traditionalists. Anyone reading that 'Vini was dead drunk the night his wife delivered a healthy eight-pound baby boy' instantly sees trouble coming." — John Cairns  "Such realistic portrayals of the evolving Naga Society, leaving aside its inherent humour, contextualizes to mind a “non-diary” Anne Frank, a “non thick-book” Roots, by Alex Haley “or less than a hundred years” Garcia Marquez for the consuming references to their umbilical roots, from where its literary spirits beautifully haunt many to this day." — Rangam Thoitak Chiru